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Ben Tarnoff: Internet for the People (Paperback, 2021, Verso Books) 4 stars

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet …

(..). "people engaged in captured activity can engage in an infinite variety of sequences of action, provided these sequences are composed of the unitary elements and means of combination prescribed by the grammar of action." In other words, one of the virtues of a grammar is the sense of freedom it allows. This sense of freedom helps explain why people find social media pleasurable. Even as their interactions are being subtly (or unsubtly) structured by the design of the user interface and the code underneath, they enjoy a feeling of autonomy (..).

Internet for the People by  (Page 95)

To be clear, it's not possible to provide a computer system without such a grammar: in the final instance, the machine instructions provide one.

But not all grammars are Turing complete. It may be that this is an aspect that differentiates a tethered appliance from a generative system: the extent to which the grammar allows the construction of new, more specialized grammars.

Something we see in Fediverse development at the moment is a discussion about the extent to which ActivityPub should or should not impose traditional social media interactions upon the protocol, as opposed to merely modelling that some activities are responses to others, keeping any details unspecified. Arguable the latter provides for more of a generative system than the former.